Amateur Question Pools

The Question Pools are developed and maintained by the Question Pool Committee (QPC) of the NCVEC by FCC instruction and Part 97 Rules & Regulation : Subpart F: §97.523 Question pools All VECs must cooperate in maintaining one question pool for each written examination element. Each question pool must contain at least 10 times the number of questions required for a single examination. Each question pool must be published and made available to the public prior to its use for making a question set. Each question on each VEC question pool must be prepared by a VE holding the required FCC-issued operator license.

The question pools are normally valid for 4 years and the current Question Pools are as follows:

Element 2 - Technician - Effective July 1, 2014 until June 30, 2018

Element 3 - General - Effective July 1, 2011 until June 30, 2015

Element 4 - Extra - Effective July 1, 2012until June 30, 2016

Each FCC Element or question pool consists of at least 10 times the number of questions required for a single examination and is released to the public normally 6 months prior to becoming effective for use in examinations to allow pleanty of time for publication and study. Each element or pool has a syllabus that is broken down into main subelement sections(normally 10) and an unlimited number of sub-topic sections under each subelement. Each subelement is numbered with a prefix designating the Element number, example T1, T2 etc, followed by the subtopic letter for the section of each subelement, example T1A,T1B, etc.

The 3 parts of a Question Pool Element Syllabus are:

SubElement ( T, G, E )

SubTopic (T1A, G1A, E1A etc)

Questions and Answers ( T1A01, G1A01, E1A01 etc)

The actual questions are numbered in a format that reflects the element, subelement and subtopic section of the syallabus where the question is found, example: T1A01 etc. Each pool is released with the exact questions and 4 multiple choice answers and the correct answer for each question is designated in ( ) just after each question ; Example: T1A01 (D) some with a rules reference [97.xxx] after the correct answer letter. On the actual exam, the correct answer letter in parentheses, and any rules citations do not appear with the question number.